The Mission of Ashes
Do we want to be a church with a mission, or a mission with a church?
If we are a part of a church with a mission, then we make the rules. We take a look around us and decide what our core values are. We may look into Scripture in order to pin some verses onto our mission statements and logos, but truly the impetus comes from our own hopes and dreams for the congregation. I remember as a youth intern, sitting with the youth minister as we plotted out the perfect verbiage for our youth ministry. Who were we in a sentence? We even had a memorization contest among the youth!
On the contrary, instead of the church crafting a mission statement lets let the mission craft the church. Prepare hearts and lives to hear the voice of God, and then begin to follow after the specific mission he would have his church do. Rather than creating an “elevator speech†from the top-down, lets let our speech flow from God, and let our lives of love for each other speak more about our church’s purpose than anything we could pen. When we are more attentive to God’s mission than we are to our own mission, things change. We may look less like a corporation, and more like a flock of sheep listening to their shepherd. We may act less like passive recipients of a worship service’s “God-talk†and more like an active, vibrant family of Jesus that can’t stop talking to each other about the great things he has done for each of us. All of a sudden, we stop being the vendor of goods and services, and become instead what we were born to be – an outpost for the reign of God’s Kingdom in this world.
Those are the thoughts that have been rolling through my head this Ash Wednesday. A funny combination of thoughts I suppose; one of penitence and death (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall returnâ€) and one of vigor and life.
We ARE dust – part of creation’s dust, atoms from the first stars. And to dust we shall return. We shall return to creation, perfectly completing the reconciliation to God, his creation, and to each other both with our physical and spiritual bodies. This is living and dying within the mission of God.
